Book Review of “Thinking in Bets”, Part 1 of 2

Written by Annie “The Duchess of Poker” Duke, Thinking in Bets is a national bestseller, and for good reason. The writing style is direct and to-the-point, and the advice is motivated by concrete examples taken from the author’s own experience. For instance, one anecdote concerns a bet among a group of friends on whether or not one of them, “Ira…

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Redefine Statistical Significance XVIII: A Shockingly Honest Counterargument

Background: the 2018 article “Redefine Statistical Significance” suggested that it is prudent to treat p-values just below .05 with a grain of salt, as such p-values provide only weak evidence against the null. By threatening the status quo, this modest proposal ruffled some feathers and elicited a number of counterarguments. As discussed in this series of posts, none of these…

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A Cartoon to Explain How Blinding Works

A Cartoon to Explain How Blinding Works The cartoon presented below is available from the artwork library of BayesianSpectacles.org under a CC-BY license. The cartoon was conceptualized by Alexandra Sarafoglou and was drawn by Viktor Beekman. It is included as an appendix in Dutilh, G., Sarafoglou, A., & Wagenmakers, E.-J. (in press). Flexible yet fair: Blinding analyses in experimental psychology.…

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Flexible Yet Fair: Blinding Analyses in Experimental Psychology

This post is an extended synopsis of Dutilh, G., Sarafoglou, A., & Wagenmakers, E.-J. (in press). Flexible yet fair: Blinding analyses in experimental psychology. Synthese. Preprint available on PsyArXiv: https://psyarxiv.com/h39jt   Abstract The replicability of findings in experimental psychology can be improved by distinguishing sharply between hypothesis-generating research and hypothesis-testing research. This distinction can be achieved by preregistration, a method…

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The Liberating Feeling of Relinquishing Control: Advice for Advisors

Disclaimer: advice based purely on the life and lab of the author. May not generalize to other people and other contexts. No literature whatsoever was consulted. Take advice at your own risk. For most of my life I have had the idea that the key to happiness is control, or at least the illusion of control. What person would delight…

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Preprint: “Because it is the Right Thing to Do”: Taking Stock of the Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative

This post is an extended synopsis of Dahrendorf, M., Hoffmann, T., Mittenbühler, M., Wiechert, S., Sarafoglou, A., Matzke, D., & Wagenmakers, E.-J. (2019). “Because it is the Right Thing to Do”: Taking Stock of the Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative. Preprint available on PsyArXiv: https://psyarxiv.com/h39jt   Abstract In recent years, multiple initiatives have sought to improve the transparency and reproducibility of…

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The Invigorating Pleasure of Witnessing a Well-Contested Rat-Fight

Throughout his books, Bayesian godfather Sir Harold Jeffreys was in the habit of starting each chapter with an epigraph. Usually these epigraphs came from different sources, but not so for his 1935 geophysics book “Earthquakes and mountains”. The book has a total of seven chapters; here are the seven associated epigraphs:   For chapter 1, “Solids and Liquids”: …but who…

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A Demon Army in Santiago: Explaining Bayesian Model-Averaging With a Cartoon

Last week I attended the 84th Annual Meeting of the Psychometric Society in Santiago, Chili. Together with Maarten Marsman I taught a JASP workshop on Monday, and then gave a keynote on Tuesday. The keynote was called “Bayesian multi-model inference for practical and impractical problems” and you can find the slides here. Due to poor planning on my side, I…

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